Gove kills the mockingbird with ban on US classic novels ...what do you think?

[mrz]

www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/article1414764.ece?CMP=OTH-gnws-standard-2014_05_24

I still have a copy of the AQA anthology from 1998 and use some of the short stories for stimulus for drama. There's one called The Exam (I think) which is fab for that, as is The Darkness Out There.

I love 'The Darkness Out There'.

Read it with year 7 last year - it was one I got the battery tea-lights & the fireplace dvd out for, one dark rainy afternoon...

If English teachers don't bother to read whole texts with their students, it's quite unlikely that students will read them independently. I wouldn't think much of any syllabus that didn't require reading the whole book. At the same time, I appreciate how hard it is to haul unready readers through a book or play.

If an exam qualification is to mean anything, a certain percentage of students can't pass.

I was a an American high school student. We read more British than American authors. My degree is in Business Management, but I've read more literature than some graduates have had hot dinners. The British canon is superior to the American.

Finding short, accessible novels is hard. Steinbeck has some good ones. But I think it would be better for British students to read British literature.

This 'don't bother to read whole texts' thing.

It's absolutely no bother to read a whole text. Easiest thing in the world, in fact, & I'd happily take a salary for doing it all day.

I'm quite good at reading out loud & most of my classes like it when I do; in fact, 'just reading' lessons are something I do as a treat or a lazy lesson - enjoyable for everyone in the room.

However, Eng Lit should be about critical engagement & analysis. The students need to respond to what they're reading, which requires detailed text analysis, annotation, discussion & the teaching of essay writing skills, & this squeezes the time available for 'bothering' to read in class.

There's a definite dilemma between 'read full texts, even if they are 500 pages long, it's important' & 'read a wide variety of genres & styles, even if it means you look at extracts rather than full texts some of the time'.

Neither is the perfect solution: but the problem of tacking full texts really, really, isn't that English teachers can't be arsed to read with their classes.

Well, maybe I am a lone voice here but I actually agree with him.
Not on having 'only' british texts- I don't think that's what this amounts to.

But I do agree that some novellas are too short by their very nature and were chosen ( the boards have said this) because they are suitable for a wide range of pupils ( ie the not so able.)

I started teaching pre GCSE ( when the old O level existed) and texts such as Of Mice and Men were the kind of books the less-able pupils would study for CSE. There is not a huge amount of depth in that book I've taught it numerous times- and it doesn't stretch brighter pupils enough.

As a child myself we read Dickens at age 12 as a class reader. I was horrified to see someone from the Association of English teachers saying something along the lines of children being 'condemned' to reading Dickens as if it's unsuitable.

Likewise, when I began teaching a novel such as Lord of the Flies was routinely read by years 7-8; there was no way it'd be considered suitable for GCSE- but now it is.

I'm trying not to play the 'age card' here but having been involved in teaching English for 40 years I can say there has been a gradual dumbing-down simply by the type of texts that are being offered by the boards, along with the nonsense such as not having to read a whole novel.

I think Gove is right to stop this and unless you've been involved in education for decades and seen the slow drip-drip of dumbing down then it's quite difficult to see it in perspective.

raven my daughter didn't read a single whole text in her GCSE literature course only photocopied extracts ... madness!

Lazy- I agree with you. It's a breath of fresh air to hear someone give a balanced and thoughtful argument rather than the frothing at the mouth anti Gove brigade (not saying that they are always wrong, but they are in this case).

You are not a lone voice- lots of other posters have echoed your views.

I seem to remember studying All Quiet on the Western Front for GCSE (along with Up the Line to Death which put me off poetry for years). But it's German so wouldn't meet the written in English criteria and now I'm wondering if my memory is faulty.

I agree that it's depressing to see a bunch of English teachers bang on about how tedious and awful English literature is, and how kids shouldn't possibly be exposed to it. You'd think that OMAM is the only book in the world worth reading. If you had a reasonably bright kid, would you want them to read OMAM or, say, 1984?

There was a teacher on one of these threads that said making 16 year old read Dickens would put them off books. I mean, seriously? Is Dickens beyond a medium ability 16 year old?

OCR draft spec here:

www.ocr.org.uk/Images/168995-gcse-english-literature-specification-j352-draft-.pdf

Animal Farm not 1984 for Orwell which is disappointing. Still, at least it's fairly short and there's a cartoon of it, which should please some.

But with no controlled assessment, there should be lots more time for reading.

Thanks for posting that draft spec. I do think it means there will be a lot of students who, for a great many (unavoidable though not brilliant) reasons, will not study anything beyond that for Eng Lit. So the new specs will actually narrow their experience not widen it.

Glad I'm not teaching OCR English Lit - I would be totally torn between Never Let Me Go and DNA for the first section...

Noble - you're right in theory. I shouldn't have the dilemma I just mentioned - I'd do both. I worry that, certainly for the first year at least, training students for terminal exams when they've been used to CA will mean that schools stick rigidly to only doing things that will Be In The Exam.

Not just a poster on this thread MrsR
" However, university professors warned the measures may put off teenagers from studying English literature.

Bethan Marshall, senior lecturer in English at King's College, London, and chairwoman of the National Association for the Teaching of English, told the Sunday Times: "It's a syllabus out of the 1940s and rumour has it Michael Gove, who read literature, designed it himself. Schools will be incredibly depressed when they see it.

"Kids will be put off doing A-level literature by this. Many teenagers will think that being made to read Dickens aged 16 is just tedious. This will just grind children down." "

Am i still allowed to didagree?

I do wonder though if these 'chairpeople' and university lecturers have any experience of teaching in schools. Or if they aspire to these positions because they are politically-inclined.
To have a negative attitude to Dickens saying it will grind pupils down is sheer nonsense- and very patronising at best. The same could be said of Mice and Men! I've never felt so ground down as when teaching M&M! Boooooooooooring book!

I don't believe that the study of literature should be dictated by location, but you do have to ask why, when the UK has a wealth of writers from Chaucer onwards, that Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck are always on the syllabus- so children learn about American culture- but know very little about their own heritage, such as Victorian London.

That OCR draft spec really shocks me. IS THAT ALL? What a pathetic excuse for a syllabus.

My dcs did Purple Hibiscus and hated it,they did enjoy an Inspector Calls though.

I am actually shocked that mosts of the books studied today are exactly the same as i did for Olevel in 1979. I did OM&M, TKAMB, an Inspector Calls and Romeo and Juliet. But back in those days we had no access to the texts in our exams and had to be able to quote from memory.

I wonder if the people at OCR finished their spec after weeks of work, finally pressed print, then read Gove's piece saying 'exam boards are free to design a course that includes the minimum plus Steinbeck et al' and said 'bugger'.

Anyone ever seen the Harry and Paul sketch where Harry Enfield is a fiercely chauvinistic Scot who claims everything is 'much much better in Scotland' all the time?

I'm afraid I'd take the opposite view: if bright kids are only exposed to US novellas then they may well choose not to study Eng Lit at A level!

One of the biggest problems with A level Lit is the huge jump from GCSE.

It's been acknowledged for some time now that the exam boards choose texts based on how easy they are to attract more entries = more money for them.

As I said, if you've been involved in teaching English for 4 decades it's easier to see how standards have been eroded- not only by grade inflation but by the content of the syllabus.

Maybe there is a case now for reverting to the previous exam system where different texts were set for different abilities because one size doesn't fit all. It's just not possible to stretch able pupils on the same texts that suit the less able.

"It's been acknowledged for some time now that the exam boards choose texts based on how easy they are to attract more entries = more money for them."

The competing exam board system is a recipe for dumbing down.

I really don't understand how we've come to this situation with different exam boards... I do agree it's daft.

DD's school reckon they've chosen a board for A level Eng Lit that is 'harder' than some others, which they think will help students applying to universities: I don't know how much harder they think it is, or whether it will help, but it seems utterly ridiculous that this should even be a conversation.